Valkyrie Sunrise

Emily sat silently in the corner of the cramped room at the back of the trailer, referred to laughably as the bedroom. Knees against her chest, eyes open and alert, she lit a cigarette. The spark of the lighter lit up her tired face momentarily, before it was relinquished back to the darkness. The only light left in the room now was that of the cheap, generic cigarette burning quickly between her fingers. She finished her smoke, crushed it under her boot on the floor, and let her head fall gently on her knees, into her folded arms. Her last thought before she fell asleep was of irritation that she still had two more hours before dawn.

The night ended in what felt to Emily as mere minutes. The first razor thin rays of light escaped their incendiary citrine master, pierced through the thin plastic blinds, and jolted her awake. Opening her eyes and quickly raising her head, she saw that is was light enough to leave the park. She felt energized, stood up, and immediately regretted it. She clutched her sides and winced further, it was worse than she’d thought. Moving to a filthy closet sized room, she turned on the light and looked in the mirror. She lost her breath, and went cold when she saw her face. She tried to find some semblance of herself in the ruined flesh she witnessed. There was none. Her left eye was mostly swollen shut, her right eye, completely. Her bottom lip had been split in several places, and she could feel at least one missing tooth with her tongue. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, she was nervous to see exactly why her stomach and chest hurt so bad. She carefully slid her hands around her waistline, and her fingers under the shirt, and pulled it off over her head with slow deliberate movements, and started crying when she saw her abdomen in the mirror.

Her entire midsection was a muddy blend of blacks, purples, and blues. She carefully touched herself just below her ribcage and sent a wave of white hot pain right through her. Her adrenalin was back on the radar now, and she felt unstoppable. She glanced out the window and knew it was time to leave. Her jaw set resolutely, and she pulled her shirt back on. Walking to the nightstand opposite the empty side of the bed, she opened the small drawer and retrieved a tin originally meant for Altoids, pushed it into the right front pocket of her jeans, and closed the drawer noisily. The figure on the bed makes absolutely zero movement, and if she didn’t know better, she would have thought it was a corpse. But she definitely knew better. She stared at him long and hard, wondering how she had let it get to this point.

“You son of a bitch,“ she spat.

She could feel the venom welling up inside her, and for a moment, she thought about simply going to the kitchen and grabbing the largest knife she could find and letting the steel swim though his skin until he was unrecognizable as anything other than meat. She lingered in the feelings that thought gave her. She’d never been a violent person, she’d always been the one trying to avoid any physicality. But she had been destroyed, taken apart, dismantled. Still, she persisted, and had been reborn.

“Be home in just a little while, honey. You behave yourself, now.” She grinned, knowing he wouldn’t be conscious until well past noon. He’d had a long night of drinking with the guys and had spent the remainder of his ‘energy’ on her when he’d gotten home.

She walked out of the bedroom, through the narrow hallway and into the living room. There were bottles and trash on every surface flat enough to hold them. She was disgusted at the state of things, but it didn’t matter. None of this would matter, in a few hours it would all be gone. She might be too, she hadn’t really decided yet. Walking out of the trailer into the drive gave her a deep start, she didn’t count on this many people being up and out already. Questions about what happened or what she was doing was something she didn’t need right now.



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